US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6280

On November 22 2016 04:31 LegalLord wrote:

He's a billionaire. I'm sure he is already adept at that game.

On November 22 2016 04:23 ticklishmusic wrote:
president is exempt from a lot of conflict of interest rules for public servants, though i would say a president should typically try and avoid impropriety/ the appearance thereof

i'm thinking the trump administration will be more scandal-ridden than a clinton one, lol.

Since President-elect Donald Trump announced that his former campaign CEO and Breitbart head Steve Bannon would be his chief strategist in the White House, Democrats, liberals and even some conservatives have expressed outrage over the selection.

Much of the criticism has been due to Bannon’s ties to the alt-right movement and his own comments that have been construed as anti-Semitic. In that vein, former DNC chairman Howard Dean spoke to a Texas news station about Bannon.

While speaking about Trump, Dean — who is running to be named chair of the DNC again — straight up called Bannon a “Nazi.”

“He appoints a reasonable person, who’s much more conservative than I am, but for somebody who can talk to, as chief of staff, and then his senior adviser is a Nazi,” Dean stated, bringing up Reince Priebus’s selection as Trump’s Chief of Staff.

KAUZ-TV: Newschannel 6 Now | Wichita Falls, TX

Calling Breitbart a “far-right, anti-Semitic publication,” Dean justified calling Bannon a Nazi by stating that “he’s anti-Semitic, he’s anti-black and he’s anti-women.”

When pressed by the reporter over using the “big word,” Dean repeated his criticism of Bannon.

“It’s a big word, and I don’t usually use it unless somebody’s really anti-Semitic, really misogynist and really anti-black,” Dean said.

This isn’t the first time Dean has said something controversial as it relates to Trump. During the campaign, he tweeted that Trump showed the signs of being a “coke user” and then defended those remarks during a TV interview. He would later issue a half-hearted apology.

On November 22 2016 04:28 Mohdoo wrote:


I expect a lot of "Well that's blatantly fucked up. Yet not illegal. -_-"

In a way, it’s a shame that President-elect Donald Trump’s resort here is located in Doral, rather than Miami Beach. If his property were closer to the water, we might be able to say: Welcome to our world, Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump said during the campaign that climate change is a hoax. But no amount of denial can shield those of us who live and work here, or visitors, from the visible impact of rising seas. Flooded streets are not a hoax. Just ask the folks in Miami Beach, who have to navigate underwater neighborhoods with increasing frequency.

But don’t feel too smug if your home or business (or golf course) is located safely on the mainland. The rising water is coming your way — to Doral and to every other part of Florida close to the ocean. Even in a post-truth world, as some have called the new era of make-believe “information,” only the most obtuse would deny that the long-feared effects of climate change have arrived in our peninsular paradise.

This is our today, our everyday reality, our future. The question is whether we fight it — and how — or whether we ignore it. For most of us, denial is not an option. Local governments are on board. How could they not be? At the state level, Gov. Rick Scott seems like a lost cause. He won’t even let state agencies employ the phrase “climate change.”

But the federal government is the most important force in shaping environmental policy and climate change strategy. That’s where broad national standards are created, where national policy is set and where policies can have the most widespread and lasting impact. It’s where the nation sets an example for the rest of the planet. And, yes, it’s where the money is.

As a candidate, Mr. Trump could afford a wink-and-nod approach to climate change. As president, he has to become a pragmatic realist. In the real world, actual facts matter. Like the fact that October 2016 was the second warmest October on record, according to data released Tuesday by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, falling just behind October 2015 by 0.18 degrees Celsius. Like the fact that 2016 is likely to be the third consecutive record-warm year in a row for the globe, topping 2015 and 2014, which currently occupy the No. 1 and 2 spots, respectively.

And while that data was being released, world leaders meeting in Morocco doubled down on plans to implement the groundbreaking Paris Agreement that at long last committed the United States, China and other countries around the world to an action plan to fight climate change.

If Mr. Trump withdraws from it, as he has promised during his campaign, it won’t kill the agreement, but it will make the United States an outlier among the world’s leading countries. Even presidents can’t turn back the rising tide. But, acting in concert with the rest of the world, they can halt its ascent and find a long-term strategy to avoid its worst effects before it’s too late.

So come on down to our beaches, Mr. Trump — preferably during a full moon, at king tide. It might awaken you to the scary truth. You would see how beaches narrow, if not altogether vanish, when the tide comes in. How streets that used to stay safely dry are now chronically in danger of flooding. How the ocean is creeping in.

You might just discover that climate change isn’t a hoax, after all. In the process, you might go from climate change denier to climate change realist. From ignoring the peril to our planet to helping heal the planet.

On November 22 2016 06:20 Nevuk wrote:
Howard Dean is calling Steve Bannon a nazi.



http://www.mediaite.com/online/howard-dean-calls-steve-bannon-a-nazi/

But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”

As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. When Mr. Spencer, or perhaps another person standing near him at the front of the room — it was not clear who — shouted, “Heil the people! Heil victory,” the room shouted it back.

Reeling from that, I walked into the area where people were eating dinner just in time to see around 20 men – some wearing Make America Great Again hats – leap from their seats and give the Nazi salute to a speaker.

One of the men wearing a hat, called Mack, walked past and me and I asked what the salute was about.

“The whole thing is we have jokes that offend the outside and we laugh,” he said.

“It’s hilarious.”

While Mack and I were talking, MacDonald, the former professor, was giving his speech on America and Jewish consciousness. He’d started off his speech by saying: “Tonight I want to talk about Jews,” which had got a big laugh from the crowd.

I asked Mack, 30, if he believed in the Holocaust. A couple of people I’d spoken to earlier had expressed doubts.

“I’m not sure, I don’t know what to believe,” he said. “If it did happen, that’s a terrible thing. I don’t agree with genocide.

“But I mean, if it happened it’s a very practical, I mean an uber-practical, kind of thing to say: ‘If it is people among a people who, let’s say, are destroying Germany because of x, y, z, then let’s root them all out and destroy them as people completely.’

“That’s pretty practical. But it doesn’t mean that it’s a moral thing. It’s not admirable. I don’t think it’s a good thing.”

On November 22 2016 06:25 Stratos_speAr wrote:


There's a 0% chance that a Republican Congress impeaches Trump unless he does something so terrible that there are riots in the streets.

Republicans are too cowardly and are too much of the "team player" type. They would see impeaching a Republican president as a huge blow to them politically and would never do it.

Bookmaker Ladbrokes has cut the odds on Donald Trump leaving office early due to impeachment or resignation amid mounting controversy about how he will manage his business interests after becoming America’s 45th President.

Ladbrokes opened the market at 3-1, cutting it to 5-2, and again to 9-4 in the wake of a flurry of bets on the back of a growing consensus among law professors that the controversial Republican is heading for trouble.

On November 22 2016 06:34 sharkie wrote:
I am not saying climate change is a total hoax but Europe never had summer all year and our spring and autumn were dsmn cold. So I really dont believe media telling me that we had a warm October. Harvest has been horrible this year.

On November 22 2016 06:34 sharkie wrote:
I am not saying climate change is a total hoax but Europe never had summer all year and our spring and autumn were dsmn cold. So I really dont believe media telling me that we had a warm October. Harvest has been horrible this year.

On November 22 2016 06:34 sharkie wrote:
I am not saying climate change is a total hoax but Europe never had summer all year and our spring and autumn were dsmn cold. So I really dont believe media telling me that we had a warm October. Harvest has been horrible this year.

On November 22 2016 06:34 sharkie wrote:
I am not saying climate change is a total hoax but Europe never had summer all year and our spring and autumn were dsmn cold. So I really dont believe media telling me that we had a warm October. Harvest has been horrible this year.

On November 22 2016 06:25 Stratos_speAr wrote:


There's a 0% chance that a Republican Congress impeaches Trump unless he does something so terrible that there are riots in the streets.

Republicans are too cowardly and are too much of the "team player" type. They would see impeaching a Republican president as a huge blow to them politically and would never do it.

On November 22 2016 06:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:

Several problems here :

1- You can't judge the effect of a global phenomenon in one place during one month. That makes 0 sense. Saying that global warming doesn't exist because you had bad weather in Austria this october is just a gross misunderstanding of what global warming is about.

2- 2016 is going to be the warmest year ever recorded. And before that 2015 held that title and before that 2014. That's not theory, that's not interpretation, that's data. We are talking about just looking at the thermometer.

3- There is no such thing as "the media". Saying you distrust "the media" means absolutely nothing. "The media" is the ensemble of all radio channels, TV channels, newspapers and even blog all around the globe. Among those are good, mediocre, bad and horrendous source of information. You are totally right not to trust Fox News, Breitbart, the Pravda or New Age alternative bloggers. Good papers, such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Economist and so on are excellent sources of informations and probably the most reliable you will get. They provide analysis that are opinion based (like every analysis) but they get their facts right.

On November 22 2016 06:34 sharkie wrote:
I am not saying climate change is a total hoax but Europe never had summer all year and our spring and autumn were dsmn cold. So I really dont believe media telling me that we had a warm October. Harvest has been horrible this year.

On November 22 2016 07:18 Dan HH wrote:

As a useful rule of the thumb, whenever you've spent all of 10 seconds pondering a subject and you think you've discovered something obvious that was missed by the thousands of people that dedicate their lives to studying said subject, googling it is an easy way of dispelling the significance of that observation.

On November 22 2016 06:34 sharkie wrote:
I am not saying climate change is a total hoax but Europe never had summer all year and our spring and autumn were dsmn cold. So I really dont believe media telling me that we had a warm October. Harvest has been horrible this year.